$8,990 on a desk. $10,300 for shelving. A 52 inch flat screen to the tune of $4000. Moorlach, whose tab was the highest among the supervisors at $198,525.84

At least John Moorlach is consistent – his total compensation package weighed in at $237k, far more than his colleagues.

John Moorlach also raked in $16k for 5 years of taxpayer money in to his 401 plan.

John Moorlach has a 2.7% at 55 Pension – guaranteed by OC Taxpayers. He also Opposed efforts to cut said pension.

7/31/2007 – Moorlach voted to bump up his Car Allowance, which counts toward his pension, nearly double his comp time from 90 to 170 hours and bumped the taxpayer funded part of his 401(k) plan from 6 to 8%

Moorlach also received $6300+ for serving on the OCTA – the Orange County Transportation Authority.

Ask yourself if this is what you thought you were getting from a “Conservative”, “Tax-Fighter”, “Fiscal Watchdog”. John Moorlach is a fraud. He got rich on your back and spent your money poorly on many occasions.

Yet, we are told by the leadership of the shrinking Orange County GOP that we are to support this guy because he is the incumbent. They haven’t gotten a dime from him either, meaning that Moorlach’s inaction has contributed to the shrinking Republican numbers in Orange County!

Just because John Moorlach foresaw the OC Bankruptcy of 20+ years ago correctly, does not qualify him to hold office. He has dined on the reputation for years. It is time to retire him.

That’s right. John Moorlach. We gotta support the incumbent politicians. We gotta ignore their self-centered ideological narcissism. We gotta ignore that they raised nothing for anyone other than themselves.

This is what the Orange County Establishment is saying. Perhaps they were happy to foot the bill for John Moorlach’s lavish office?

We’ve documented that Moorlach voted to increase his compensation and on several (two documented on this blog) cases attempted to extend the time he could serve in office to continue drawing those massive paychecks.

And all four ordered 52-inch wall-mounted flat-screen televisions. The supervisors’ televisions, which will go in their personal offices, cost $4,000 apiece; Street’s, in his conference room, cost $7,800.

The Street referenced is the controversial former OC Treasurer Chriss Street, whose largesse was defended by Moorlach – which was cited in an epic rheeming from OC’s own anti-government watchdog Steven Greenhut.

Moorlach, whose tab was the highest among the supervisors at $198,525.84, said he felt it was unfair to ask office staff to work in the existing environment. “When I got here, I thought I had moved into an old home in Palm Springs in the 1960s,” he said. “It even went beyond my conservative pale. I said, ‘Wait a minute, this has got to be upgraded.’

The latest excuse to break conservative discipline. Even Moorlach’s Chief of Staff got a desk that was more expensive than the others:

Most of the big-ticket items were desks: chiefs of staff to Bates and Nguyen got them for $6,175 each; the one for Moorlach’s chief of staff cost $8,180.

John Moorlach: Fiscal Conservative?

Some of his supporters have sought to justify this largesse by pointing out that the other supervisors did it. Please note that this blog outlines that Moorlach spent even more on himself and his office than the rest did. It is bad enough to buy such overpriced office furniture, but the point is that Moorlach went the extra mile and spent even more than his colleagues!

Oh, and he justified this in interviews like everything else and so will his supporters.

You have a choice, big time. Big Government John or Real Conservative Don.

Lesson 1. Rules in the Orange County Political Elite are selectively enforced:

According to records at the Secretary of State’s office, the Orange County Professional Firefighters Association contributed $5,000 to the California Taxpayer Protection Committee on October 22, 2014, the same day the group reported spending $42,914 on independent expenditures for Lalloway.

Emails obtained by the Weekly also show that Lalloway, an appointed Orange County Fire Authority board member, told Jon Fleischman, a prominent Republican activist who managed the political action committee, that the firefighters had endorsed his candidacy.

Fleischman, who has made no secret of his loathing of public employee unions over the years, then contacted Tony Bedolla, a longtime firefighter’s union boss, for a contribution and supportive quote to be included in election literature.

Scott Baugh, he of the recent self-aggrandizing betrayal of Don Wagner gave the famous edict that is known as the “Baugh Manifesto” – this was thou shalt never, ever take money from or accept the support of Labor Unions. But his errand boy was right there with his hand out for said help. Whoops.

Don Wagner gets help from Unions, Bad. Other candidate (who is on the OC Cent Com) gets help from Unions. Crickets.

Lesson 2. Political Incest.

The CRA’s Pol-Pot Bellied Information Minister, Thomas N Hudson and AD55 Candidate (and former CRA President) Mike Spence are both publicly affiliated with the California Taxpayer Protection Committee and have been for years. Cozy.

Do you ever wonder why I am projecting a CRA endorsement of Spence in AD55? I am sure, of course there will be a nice “un-coordinated” independent expenditure as well. I wonder if Mr. Anti-Union Flash will run it.

Scott Baugh minimized the role of Don Wagner’s hundreds of thousands of dollars raised and given to Republican Candidates at the Orange County GOP meeting where they rammed down an endorsement of the unpopular and troubled Big Government John Moorlach. I have been looking for answers beyond the base self-serving political betrayal angle. Perhaps Mr. Baugh may have felt differently if Don Wagner had cut a check to the fraudulent shell group known as the California Taxpayer Protection Committee? (it should be called the California Taxpayer Protection Racket, but I digress)

Lesson 4. It is still about defending and protecting failure.

Never, ever support a challenger, ever lest we set a precedent for someone to challenge us. This is base human nature and a cold hard fact. This is also a symptom of moral bankruptcy when the same group supported a liberal Democrat who conveniently re-registered as a Republican in order to run for OC Sheriff. She is hostile at best to gun owners. Get this – John Moorlach even defended Mike Corona whose replacement these people thought they could control the selection of:

At it’s enactment, many of the GOP faithful praised the move, while others saw it as a hamfisted way to harm a single, 2010 candidate, Bill Hunt, a veteran deputy seeking to replace Baugh-backed Mike Carona, who was convicted of corruption and sent to federal prison for more than six years, as sheriff.

Hunt is a Republican–a very conservative one, in fact–but he is also fiercely independent, a trait party bosses abhor. The Baugh Manifesto went into effect while Hunt, a veteran sheriff’s deputy and former chief of police in San Clemente, was favored by the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, whose coffers have influenced elections for decades in the county. Sandra Hutchens, a Los Angeles Democrat turned OC Republican, won that election and remains in office.

A gun-grabbing Orange County Sheriff was the beneficiary of the famous OC Central Committee rule about Labor Union Money. Ouch.

Earlier this month, Moorlach was in Washington on the taxpayers’ dime to lobby for a bipartisan pension-reform bill. Thanks to a tip from Walters’ consultant, Dave Gilliard, I learned that he met with the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform to seek their support for his House bid while he was there. That rubbed Gilliard, Maciariello and Raths the wrong way.

“I don’t have the luxury of having the county pay for me to go to Washington so I can meet with campaign-related people,” Raths said.

In the Past – Moorlach was sued by the California Club for Growth Newsletter, the Non-Partisan Candidate Evaluation Council and the National Guard Association of California. They all had to sue Moorlach to get him to pay his bills to them for their slate mail cards.

The Moral of Today’s Post – John Moorlach pulls the same crap many other ethically-challenged candidates pull.

This is of course why Moorlach would rather you pay attention to the bright shiny Pringle over there or the independent expenditures over here – rather than focusing on his own blatant hypocricy that will cost him his next paycheck on our dime. #facepalm

Moorlach appeared to flip on the Death Penalty – letting his Chief of Staff at the time (who is a liberal) go on a rampage:

“Given Mr. Mainero’s self-proclaimed opposition to the death penalty and your previous admonishment on his injecting it into budget discussions, I considered it inappropriate that this matter was brought forward at this meeting under the guise of a budget issue,” Rackauckas wrote. “In my view, it was not and is not proper that your office attempted to influence the constitutional duties of an elected official in order to obstruct the will of the voters as reflected by California’s very clear laws calling for the death penalty in appropriate circumstances under the cloak of a budget discussion.”

Moorlach Appeared to Squish on the Gun Issue:

Even after Hutchens filled a Board of Supervisors meeting with more than two dozen deputies, including SWAT officers, who questioned and searched peaceful members of a gun-rights group who showed up to speak out against the sheriff’s new policies, Moorlach publicly stood by the sheriff. He stood by her after it was revealed that her deputies used the security cameras to zoom in on the notes and BlackBerry screens of fellow supervisors. He stood by her even after a public records request revealed that sheriff’s officials mocked the people who came to address the board. Moorlach and Mainero told me they agree with my concerns and raised them privately to the sheriff and her command staff, yet the public isn’t privy to such things.

Ironically, Rackauckas and Hutchens both endorsed Don Wagner (over John Moorlach originally) who is A rated by all gun rights groups and is unabashedly a social conservative.

Furthermore, Moorlach and Mainero supported efforts by self-described O.C. campaign-finance watchdog and political activist Shirley Grindle to create a permanent county bureaucracy to monitor campaign violations. It failed, but this put the Moorlach office further at odds with Chris Norby, the libertarian-oriented Republican supervisor who has long taken a principled stand against more government meddling with political speech and financing.

I had previously imagined that Moorlach and Norby would be natural allies, given their political perspectives, and that the key would be peeling away a third vote from among the other supervisors. But as Moorlach has moved in his current direction, the two offices have been at constant odds. In particular, Moorlach and Mainero have resented Norby’s well-known bluntness (Moorlach accuses Norby of being a demagogue).

In activist land – we call this getting vested in your office. I am living with this in my own backyard with a slew of partisan officeholders that have either gone native like Moorlach or they vote no on everything and do nothing for their district, leaving local government undefended to fend for themselves.